Back to Work - Bill Clinton [57]
THE SUREST WAY TO CREATE JOBS, cut costs, enhance national security, cut the trade deficit by up to 50 percent, and fight global warming is to change the way we produce and consume energy. Even though the climate change deniers seem to have succeeded in making their position a core tenet of antigovernment ideology, there is a case to be made on economics alone.
The main reason there has been no international agreement to cut greenhouse-gas emissions is that too many decision makers still don’t believe we can do it without curbing economic growth and too many carbon emitters keep reinforcing that notion.
Lately, the opponents of green energy have started going after the economics hard, claiming green jobs cost over $1 million each and playing up the failure of a solar company that received more than $500 million in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy. The critics claim this example proves green tech is a dead end.
They’re wrong. In July 2011, according to a report issued by the Brookings Institution and Battelle, newer clean-tech jobs grew 8.3 percent from 2003 to 2010, twice as fast as jobs in other occupations, and median wages were 20 percent higher than for other occupations, almost $44,000, compared with $38,616. The sector has continued to grow through the recession and now accounts for 2.7 million jobs. Its exports in goods and services amounted to $53.9 billion in 2009.
These trends have developed in the face of a severe global recession and even though, unlike our major competitors, the United States hasn’t passed legislation to limit carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax, or adopted a clear standard to increase the percentage of our electricity generated by clean energy by a fixed date, or committed to a clear long-term strategy of incentives to encourage large investments in clean energy and efficiency.
We’ve done as well as we have because of America’s enormous capacity to generate energy from clean sources and to improve efficiency; the large number of entrepreneurs, innovators, and financiers committed to a clean-energy future; and federal investments, tax incentives, and rule making since 2007, especially in the stimulus bill, that directed the equivalent of $800 per household to clean-energy funding, loan guarantees, and tax incentives, more than $90 billion in total.
The progress in wind energy is particularly impressive. On a windy day in Texas, wind power can spike to 25 percent of total generation. It’s 20 percent in Iowa. More than 50 percent of the contents of current turbines installed in the United States are made in America, with more to come. In Michigan, URV USA is constructing the first foundry built in America in decades to provide the most up-to-date wind turbine casting. In 2009, enough new wind capacity was installed to power three million homes. And our wind power potential is staggering—37 trillion kilowatt hours, almost ten times our existing needs.
You can tell I’m a big fan of President Obama’s energy policy and of the leadership of the secretary of energy, Steven Chu. But they’re facing a lot of competition in the battle for clean-energy jobs. Germany and China lead the world in clean-energy exports; China has installed more wind capacity than the United States, has about half the global market in solar cells, and is racing ahead with tens of billions of dollars in new investments and incentives, in a determined effort to lead the world in both the installation and the export of clean-tech products. Other countries are moving up, too. European countries lead the world in offshore wind power generation.